I . 1.3.2.

Question formotions

Two basic forms of th e question that have been the focus of much research are Yes-No questions and WH
questions.

Yes-No question
It involves the same basic syntactic considerations as in the formation of negatives. 'be' , mod al, AUX, etc. must
have that item in the front of the sentence in a question.
Example:
Bobby can go to the store' and 'Can Bobby go to the store?'
Modal is fronted.

WH questions
It is the initial sound of the various question words: who, what, where, when, how, why, etc,. They are formed by
substituting the phrase which is targeted for questioning with an appropriate WH word. The WH word is always
placed at the beginning of the sentence.
'The monkey will be on the table?’ becomes 'Where will the monkey be?'
Modal fronted to follow WH.
The child may not only be producing language through use of grammatical rules, but also may be using other
strategies such as memorized chunks of language. For example, in the Bloom et al.
(1982) data, 'what' and 'where' often appeared in what might be considered unanalysed chunks ('What's that?',
'What (X) doing?', 'What happened?', 'Where (X) go?').

I. 1.3.3. Passive formation

Children begin to use more complex forms such as the passive much later in their language development,
perhaps due to its relatively infrequent use by adults in speech to children (Wells, 1978). The simple passive is
related to the active in the following way:
'The boy pushed the truck'
'The truck pushed the boy'
Agent subject and object NPs are reversed.
'The truck pushed by the boy'
'by' appears before agent NP.

1. 1.3.4. Other problems

Structures with two or more verbs

As may be expected, the acquisition of complex sentences, utterances containing two or more verbs, occurs much
later than the forms discussed above, and may not be complete until the age of 11. Limber (1973) analysed the
emergence of these forms as they began to appear around the age of 2
or 3 years. Almost all of these complex forms consist of clauses that are attached to the end of utterances, e.g, 'I want
Bill to go'. Only much later do clauses appear within the utterances, e.g. 'The man who lives here is gone'.

Ve,-b problems
Carol Chomsky (1969) found that some complex grammatical structure may not be acquired until quite late, even at
the age of 10 or 11 years. She looked at the application of the Minimal Distance Principle (MDP) (Rosenbaum,
1967). When children use the MDP, they sometimes apply it incorrectly depending on the verb in the main clause.
For example, in the sentence "[John told Bill to shovel the driveway' it is clear to children that Bill will do the
shovelling. On the other hand, in a sentence such as 'John promised Bill to shovel the driveway', children apply the
same strategy and assign the shovelling task to the closest noun 'Bill' when they ought to be interpreting the meaning
so that it is John who will do the work.

1.2. The Development of Speech Comprehension

1.2.1 . Fetuses and Speech Input
Can speech sounds reach the fetus while it is still in the uterus? Benzaquen, Gagnon, Hunse, and Foreman (1990)
put a microphone inside the uterus of pregnant women to see if speech sounds could reach the ear of the fetus over
the background sounds of the women's heartbeat and blood flow. The rnother's speech sounds were found to be able
to reach the ear of the fetus above the background sounds. However, whether the ear of the fetus is developed
enough to send such sounds to the brain is unknown.

1.2.2. Newborns (Neonates) and Speech Input

Infants may even prefer their native language ar birth. In two studies on babies' preferential listening (Mehler,
Jusczyk, Lambertz, Halsted, Bertoncini, & Amiel-Tison, 1988; Bertoncini, Morais, Bijeljac-Babic, McAdams,
Peretz, & Mehler, 1989), the neonates chose to listen to French, the lanuage their mothers spoke while pregnant,
rather than Russian which their mothers did not speak; children born to mothers who did not speak French did not
demonstrate the ability to discriminate between the two languages. Thus, the fetus may have been affected by the
vibrations from the mother's voice that reached its developing ears thro ugh the body tissues. This ability to
distinguish the language spoken by the mother could be ascribed to intonational differences between the languages
which the fetus receives.

1.2.3. Speech Comprehension Occurs without Speech Production: The Case of Mute-Hearing
Children

Even though the ability of uttering speech is good indicator of language knowledge, the ability to
produce speech may not indicate a lack of language knowledge. Here’s story example:

Christopher Nolan:
He was suffering brain damage since birth, but fortunately his intelligence was undamaged and his
hearing was normal. He became a book writer how that worked was since the stick was put to his
head which connected to the letter. He can hear but can’t produce speech sound properly.

The conclusion is persons who are mute but hearing can develop the ability to comprehend speech
without their being able to produce speech, so long as their basic intelligence is intact.

1.2.4. In Normal Children Speech Comprehension Develops in Advance of Speech Production

The two systems of comprehension and production do not develop separately for the normal child. As the child
acquires an aspect of grammar for comprehension, the child will then try to figure out how to use it in production.

Steinberg and Steinberg (1975) taught their son to read (understand the meaning of) many written words,
phrases, and sentences even before he was able to say them. Thus, he was able to respond appropriately to
words and sentences, e.g. 'Open the door,' whether they were in speech or in writing and even when he himself
did not say those words. The items that he had been taught to read were only those items that he could
comprehend when such items were spoken to him. Later he was able to comprehend novel combinations of
those written items.

1.3. The Relationship of Speech Production, Speech Comprehension and Thought

1.3.1. Speech Comprehension Necessarily Precedes Speech Production

In learning any of th e world's languages, the child must first be able to comprehend the meaning of the language
before they themselves can produce it. Children first need to be exposed to utterances with a clear connection to the
articles referred to before they themselves can begin to say such utterances.

104. Parentese and Baby Talk

1.4.1. Parentese

During th e 1960s, Chomsky's theorizing about innate language knowledge had a dampening effect on the study of
experiential input, both language and environmental, with respect to the learning of language. A sort of mystical
aura dominated the field. Language was not 'learned' bur somehow mysteriously 'acquired'. Typical of views at the
time was that of the language philosopher, Jerry Fodor. At a talk at the University of Hawaii in 1965 (which the first
author attended), he suggested that a child could learn language simply by being exposed to sentences, with little or
no necessity for relevant environmental stimuli (objects, events, situations).

Parentese (coined by the first author in Steinberg, 1993, p. 22) is the sort of speech that children receive when they
are young. Parentese is also referred to as 'Motherese', 'caregiver speech', 'Adult-to-Child Language' (ACL) (Reich,
1986), and as 'C hild-Directed Speech' (CDS) (Pine, 1994). All of these terms take into consideration th e fact that th
e child receives input from many sources - mother, father, siblings, relatives, friends, etc, (Nwokah, 1987; Bavin,
1992) - and that such input has special linguistic characteristics.

1.4.2. Characteristics of Parentese

Immediacy and concreteness
Parents generally talk to their children about what is happening in the immediate environment and not about abstract
or remote objects and events (Phillips, 1973; Slobin, 1975). A sentence like 'The dog wants water' and not 'Speech
comprehension precedes speech production in language learning' is what a 1- or 2-year-old is likely to hear.

Grammaticality of input
Ungrammatical sentences arc found to occur but rarely. Newport (1975, 1976), for example, in a long-term study
with 15 mothers, reports an incidence of only one ungrammatical utterance in 1500 in their speech. Such
grammatical consistency undoubtedly is useful to the child who is searching to discover the structures which
underlie sentences.

Short sentences and simple structures

Speech directed to children by adults also tends to consist of short sentences with simple rather than complex
structures (Snow, 1972; Garnica, 1977a; Seitz & Stewart, 1975), such as 'The dog wants water' as opposed to 'The
dog which has been running a lot wants to drink some water'.

Vocabulary: simple and short

The vocabulary typically used by adults is simple and restricted (Phillips, 1973; Seitz & Stewart , 1975), e.g. 'see'
instead of' notice', 'hard' rather than 'difficult' , and has simplified phonology and struc ture (Ferguson, 1964, 1977;
DePaulo & Bonvillian, 1978).

Exaggerated intonation, pitch, and stress

Furthermore, adults exaggerate intonation and use a slower tem po (Garnica,
1977b; Drach, 1969; Cross, 1977), and frequently repeat or rephrase what they or their children say (Snow, 1972;
Brown & Bellugi, 1964; Newport, 1975; Kobashigawa, 1969). For example, adults tend to use higher pitch, slower
speech, with more and clearer pauses between utterances, and they place more distinctive stress on words than they
do when speaking with other adults.

Older children too adapt their speech.

It is interesting that not only adults but children, too, tend to use simplified speech in talking with younger children.

1.4.3. Baby Talk

Baby Talk is a form of Parentese but with its own characteristics. While Parentese uses vocabulary and syntax,
though simpler than that addressed to other adults, Baby Talk involves the use of vocabulary and syntax that is
overly simplified and reduced. However, it should be remembered that Baby Talk
is something that parents learn from other adults and involves standardized vocabulary. It is 'standard' in the sense
that such vocabulary is culturally transmitted over generations.

Vocabulary
Most Baby Talk involves modifications in vocabulary. There are already established words like 'bow-wow' (dog).
The main sound structure of such words tends to be dominated by a Consonant + Vowel syllable unit which is often
repeated (reduplicated).

Syntax
Syntax plays a less prominent role in Baby Talk than does vocabulary. Parents seem only occasionally to use Baby
Talk syntax. When they do, their utterances are strikingly similar to those in the children's telegraphic stage of speech
production. A mother might say, for example, something like 'Mommy give Tony banana' instead of the
syntactically proper 'I will give you a banana'.

1.4.4. The Effect of Parentese and Baby Talk in Language Learning

The effects of Parentese have been found to depend as much on the child as on the parent (Hampson & Nelson,
1993), and on the interaction between the child and parent (Yoder & Kaiser, 1989; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1990). As long as
the child receives appropri ate language input which is clearly related to environmental and mental experiences, and
is appropriate for the child's cognitive level, there is no good reason to believe that a child would not learn language
at a level near that of his or her peers who do receive Parentese and Baby Talk.

1.5. Imitation, Rule Learning, and Correction

1.5.1. What is Learned by Imitation
Most ordinary people believe that language is learned by imitation. By imitation it is meant that the child copies and
repeats aloud the words which he or she hears. Through imitation, children learn how to pronounce sounds and
words and they seem to enjoy imitating the sounds which they hear
(Masur, 1995). All th is is fine. However, it must be kept in mind that there is an obvious limitation, which is tha t
imitation can apply only to speech production and not to speech comprehension. Since we know that speech
comprehension precedes speech production, we can say that imitation cannot be involved in the primary process of
language learning, comprehension. A further limitation is that even in the domain of production, imitation is not
involved in the construction of sentences.

1.5.2. Productivity by Rule

The child's production of certa in novel words and sentences cannot be explained by imitation, Children commonly
produce ungrammatical words like:
I. 'sheeps', 'mouses', and 'gooses', regarding the PLURAL, and
2. 'goed', 'comed', 'falled', and 'breaked', regarding the PAST .
Why do they utter such words? It cannot be because of imitation because
no one says such words for them to imitate.

1.5.3. The Frequent Futility of Correction

It used to be thought by many that the correction of children's speech is essential to improvement. Research has
shown, though, th at such is not the case, with parents typically paying little attention to the grammatical correctness
of their children's speech (Brown, 1973; Brown, Cazden , & Bellugi,
1969). When parents do attempt to correct their children's speech, the results are often fruitless and frustrating. The
above example with the mother and son where the mother set out to correct the child's grammar is typical in this
regard, She was not successful.

1.6. Learning Abstract Words

When acquiring the meanings of words, children begin with the concrete and go on to the abstract, They begin
with physical objects ('mama', 'dog', 'ball', 'table') and direct activities (' run', 'jump', 'play', 'give') then move to
relations and statives ('on', 'sitting'). Soon following will be words involving mental experiences and relations
('hungry', 'hurt', 'happy', 'want') which then yield such utterances as 'Mary hurt', 'John thirsty' and 'Kitty wanna
eat'.
Later come complex abstract ideas ('I' (speaker), 'you' (listener), 'truth', ' lie', 'honest', 'guess', 'hope', 'idea', '
thought').
For example, how might the words 'hungry' and 'hurt' be learned? First the child must take note of when such
words are spoken by others and the situations in which they occur. The child might cry and the mother might
then say, 'Are you hungry?' The mother says it is because the mother guesses what the child's internal state might
be, based on when the child last ate, for instance, if the child has the feeling of hunger, the child may then guess
(after some repeated instances) that 'hungry' refers to what he or she is feeling. Or, the child might point to a banana
and the mother might say in response, 'Do you want a banana?' and the child might get the meaning of 'want'.

Consider 'hurt' . Perhaps the child falls and is bruised on the knee. The father might say, 'Poor girl. Does it hurt?' The
child's feeling of pain might then be associated with the word 'hurt'. Or, on receiving an injection with a syringe, the
child cries, and the father says, 'Ir hurts, doesn't it? Poor
child.' It is up to the child to remember what words were spoken, e.g. 'hungry' and 'hurt' , and to relate them to part
icular feelings thar the child has experienced in the mind, 'hunger' and 'pain', After a number of such instances where
certain words (spoken by others) and certain feelings are experienced together, the child will have enough
information to make a guess at which sound form relates to which feeling.

1.7. Memory and Logic in Language Learning

1.7.1 . Memory
Underlying all of the remarkable accomplishments of the child in language learning is one crucially important
psychological factor, that of memory. For, in the course of learnin g to identify the words of the language, devising
rules for their use, and relating speech to the environment and mind, the child utilizes a phenomenal memory
capacity. The child must remember a multitude of particular words, phrases, and sentences, along with the contexts,
both physical and mental, in which they occurred. Such data provide
the basis for struc tu ral analyses and the acquisition of vocabulary.

If children did not remember many of the words, phrases, and sentences they heard, they would have little basis for
discovering abstract meanings and rules.

1.7.2. Logic
In learning language, the child must use both induction and deduction in the analysis of words and sentences and the
formulation of grammar and strategies.

Children use inductive logic

Even in the early grammatical phase of learning basic morphemes, e.g. Progressive,
Plural, and Third Person, children must use an inductive analysis.
Taking the Plural as an example, children must scan the sentences uttered by mature speakers and then note that a
suffix is added when two or more objects are being talked about.

Young children use deductive logic

The child's production of speech, even in the early years, reflects a great deal of conceptualization and thinking on
the part of the child. Suppose one 4-year-old child (Rose) says to another child (Tom), 'You have more than me!'
This is said in a situation where an adult has put down a plate of cookies in front of the two children and the children
have made a grab for them. Then suppose that, after Rose has said this, Tom, the child with the greater number of
cookies, gives some to Rose, the child with the lesser number.
Such an advanced level of conceptual development may surprise many of us, especially some Piagetian theorists,
who, relying on such limited notions as 'conservation', believe that deductive logic develops after the age of 6 years
(Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). A proper language analysis, such as the one
above, demonstrates that age norms for the development of deductive logic must be drastically revised downwards,
As for inductive logic, norms have yet to be established, but they surely would have to be below th e child's second
or first year.
Then, too, according to Piaget, intelligence has its basis in the child performing actions with respect to objects in the
world . Here, also, Piaget was mistaken. Such actions are not essential to the development of intelligence or
language. As we noted earlier with the cases of virtually paralysed persons like Nolan and McDonald, their lack of
such behaviour did not prevent their development of inteIligence and language.
The 1- and 2-year-o ld child is quite an intellectual marvel whose thinking powers should not be underestimated .